Not sure if you are serious or not. I'm running FF & IE on a 799 MHz Pentium-something-or-other under Win2K. Not exactly fast. But when I start up FF it starts up faster than IE. But that is because I expect a slow startup for FF the _first_time_ after a reboot. After that it doesn't matter.
Yep about the memory FF is a bit of a hog. I expect that to improve, it used to be much worse.
And URL. 200ms. Are you serious? I'm not trying to be snide. How fast do you expect to type in a URL text field? Personally I don't notice it and I type reasonably fast. But then again I never type fast when entering a URL. In fact come to think of it I rarely type URLs these days.
You don't have to BE guilty, someone just has to think your guilty. Or eventually, you could just be a lesson to others no matter if you are innocent or not. By then you are into a reign of terror... which can last a long time.
If you are innocent then you have nothing to worry about misses the point. Who says I am innocent or not. Do I get a chance to defend myself. If you want real brinkmanship, this is not recommended by the way, you could say "well I could tell the cops I saw you reading some terrorist literature, but you're innocent right? But if I didn't like you it would be easy. No proof necessary." Everyone repeat after me : witch-hunt.
Interestingly in a story about global communications satellites Arthur C. Clarke predicted that one of the prime uses of a communications system that could not be censored by governments would be the transmission of pornography (though he didn't actually call it that).
There was a "major" oil discovery just last week in Alaska as I recall. About 4 billion barrels. Much joy all round. Except that the world uses up 5 billion barrels a YEAR and increasing.
Once you can't pump out the oil fast enough to meet demand then you have peak oil. There will still be a lot there (but diminishing) but you wont have enough and prices will sky rocket.
The oil price feeds into everything. From the price of food and materials to intangibles. Oil is needed to make a lot of things or to transport it or simply for electricity. A dramatic increase in the price of oil is a very serious thing. I remember when the first Gulf War was in full swing people were waving placards saying "no blood for oil", which I thought was stupid... oil is worth paying for in blood. No oil, no civilisation. Mind you I think the current foray into Iraq was dumb beyond belief, but that's another matter.
Amen to that. When I saw it I was willing to watch anything that was even vaguely SF. No matter how bad. But I mentally gagged on BG. So pitiful it became my standard of bad SF... oh except maybe for the tv series about Buck Rogers (shudder!). Didn't Larsen even say at one point that they had created a library of clips of space battles so they didn't have to do any more special effects? Well it showed.
So to see such an amazingly good recreation of it is a complete and very welcome surprise. I think the remake will join my small list of amazing SF on tv: A for Andromeda, Night of the Big Heat (not the terrible movie remake), Outer Limits (original), Star Trek, some of the X-Files.
... than a lamb. Wasn't that a saying back in times when you could be hung for minor crimes?
If they are going to kill you anyway then don't just release a virus to do a little bit of mischief, cause some deaths. In fact cause a LOT of deaths. Able to hack into a nuclear power plant? Go for it, see how far it'll blow. Enough people will think like that to make the suggestion very dangerous.
How can anyone rationally suggest this when law envorcement and the general public have no idea what "hacking" is anyway? I once told someone I worked (programmed) on crypto stuff... and had to explain for the next 10 minutes that in fact it WAS legal. Gees! And these are the "peers" that would judge me?
Actually for a long time I've suspected that the gross rate of innovation per capita has been dropping. But I don't think it is surprising. In smaller populations there is more incentive to innovate since there is usually no-one nearby with a solution to your problem. And bigger societies are generally dumber, well lazier is what I really mean. No-one has to innovate. Another factor may be that although a lot of people are innovating the mass media which fuels support (ie funds) for ideas can only handle a maximum load of new ideas, and that does not increase much with population.
As for the "end of innovation". Um... since people have been inventing and innovating for almost all of the tenure of homo sapiens I don't think it is going to end. A nation or civilisation may suppress it, but they aren't going to last long anyway.
Re:Is it just me, or why not explain it better?
on
Eclipse 3.1 Released
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· Score: 1
As Java becomes more and more popular you get developers who know jack shit taking it up. I talked to one the other day, nice guy, intelligent. He didn't know what design patterns were and he was a Java developer. Holly f**k! He didn't know about Netbeans and he didn't know about Eclipse. Unbelievable. I'm sure some of these people have never visited Javasoft or been to the Java Lobby sites. He was a *recent* graduate, and he had never touched any C. The mind boggles.
It isn't a "bold faced lie"(sic). At worst I was merely wrong. I based it on what was written in "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns". That book didn't say that they didn't realise something had happened they just didn't know what, only much later did they realise it was a nuclear weapon. Though some Japanese scientists feared a nuclear attack well before Hiroshima but were not listened to.
As for the burning city. Well when a single raid killed 100,000 in Tokyo from incendiaries do they automatically think this wasn't the result of a similar kind of attack?
If the attack includes multiple ground bursts on each missile silo (as expected). Then there is going to be a lot of short term radioactive fallout. If as a strategy of attack the enemy ground bursts a nuke on a nuclear power plant the amount of fallout will be immense causing probably more deaths than the blast would have. Scientific American did an analysis of this many years ago, creepy.
Just as a reminder. When people talk about modern nuclear war they think of one bomb hitting a city, which is of course very far from the truth. A large city may be targetted with half a dozen thermonuclear warheads with possible backup attacks coming later. The attacker may decide that some ground bursts in amongst those will prevent rebuilding any nearby infrastructure by adding lethal levels of radiation to the mix.
A lot of the scientists involved had thought that Japan would be shown the power of the nuke and then threatened. Failing that, that a military target would be used, Hiroshima wasn't that much of military target, otherwise why was it untouched in the regular bombings. However, even after Hiroshima was bombed communications within the country was so bad that the central government didn't know what had happened until the bombing of Nagasaki. Nagasaki was in that sense unnecessary and so too probably was Hiroshima. There was talk within the Japanese goverhment of surrender, an explicit threat of nuclear weapons was never made to tip the balance.
Too late now of course. Lots of bad shit happens in wars. What is not so well appreciated is that a lot of very very bad stuff happens in the closing days of a war, because the enemy defenses collapse and bloodlust takes over. Happens all through history, WW2 was no exception. You could view the use of nuclear weapons as an example of this with an unusually potent weapons technology. Still, more died in Tokyo or Dresden than at Hiroshima.
Yeah its fine to estimate the probabilities of various technologies based on existing theories. But remember that many many theories have bitten the dust. QM & Relativity seem particularly consistent but that is no guarantee that they are right or that some method of FTL wont be found.
Besides sometimes to make a point in a story you have to break a rule. Just so long as you don't do it too often (I think the writers call it The Tooth Fairy Principle). For instance, Foundation would be pretty crappy if they didn't have FTL wouldn't it? Whereas Benford's series about the war with the Machine Cultures (In the Ocean of night, Tides of light etc etc) does not use FTL at all and is still pretty good.
We are talking about fiction. If you make it too real it becomes boring. It was for this reason I could never stand anything Ben Bova wrote. SF is about vision not nuts and bolts.
When reading the headline, was I the only one who completed it as "Redhat Lays Groundwork for Fedora Foundation... at the other end of the galaxy"? Oh. Guess not.
Before you make such sweeping statements perhaps you should google for Enderley's other articles which easily outstrip even this article. The man is a master of crap, thank you very much. Not easily achieved!
Let me see, a feature in every other browser finally makes it to a non-released possible version of IE and it is news. Sorry, not trolling... honestly, who gives a shit?
One of the clear conclusions of 20th century physics and psychology is that commonsense is very limited when dealing with the physical world. Just because something seems obvious that doesn't mean it is true.
A glaring example of this was a series of experiments done with freshman physics students to test their physical intuition. One of the questions involved something like the following: a bomber (plane) is coming over a target at such and such a speed show on the diagram where it should release the bombs. A huge percentage (the majority) don't remember the exact number, stated that the bombs should be released directly over the target. These are people who think they know about momentum but their intuition still works on the idea that the bomb will drop without any horizontal component. When I was a kid I tried using a sling (like the traditional type)j but couldn't work out why the stone came out at right angles to where I wanted it to go... I had to think about it before I realised. But my instincts were wrong. So much for commonsense. And if you want the definitive example of this then look no further than Special Relativity or even better Quantum Mechanics.
Reminds me of the quote by Sir Ernest Rutherford: "We haven't got much money, so we'll have to think". Supposedly explaining the simple elegance of his experiments that got him the Nobel Prize.
One factor I find in going back to sources, of any kind, is that the work has a different quality to what comes after. Afterwards people extract the "good bits" and eventually it becomes the norm. But in the original the ideas live in an ecosystem, if you will, of other ideas that support it. I first noticed this when reading original scientific works, sure the later stuff says it better etc, but it doesn't include the revealing arguments and ideas of someone forging into the unkown (for example try reading Origin Of Species). They don't know how important their work is going to be, they have to therefore try to make their effort stand by itself. Old films are like this, you can see flaws (by later standards) but you can also see the technique or dialog in a new way.
Apart from that some of the songs are actually good. I was surprised last time I watched it... I was totally mesmerised, like a combination of beatiful European women, some decent songs and a lot of subtle satire (without the performers realising it).
I'm hooked. It helps if the commentator is good at satire.
... is the phrase "is our destiny". When people start talking like this then really bad things start to happen. Surely I don't need to supply examples.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if you are serious or not. I'm running FF & IE on a 799 MHz Pentium-something-or-other under Win2K. Not exactly fast. But when I start up FF it starts up faster than IE. But that is because I expect a slow startup for FF the _first_time_ after a reboot. After that it doesn't matter.
Yep about the memory FF is a bit of a hog. I expect that to improve, it used to be much worse.
And URL. 200ms. Are you serious? I'm not trying to be snide. How fast do you expect to type in a URL text field? Personally I don't notice it and I type reasonably fast. But then again I never type fast when entering a URL. In fact come to think of it I rarely type URLs these days.
Friend: "Er, right. Suddenly everything becomes clear-as-in-mud." Me: "Actually it recently got a bit more complicated..."
No, that usually happens by about Beer 9.0.
You don't have to BE guilty, someone just has to think your guilty. Or eventually, you could just be a lesson to others no matter if you are innocent or not. By then you are into a reign of terror ... which can last a long time.
If you are innocent then you have nothing to worry about misses the point. Who says I am innocent or not. Do I get a chance to defend myself. If you want real brinkmanship, this is not recommended by the way, you could say "well I could tell the cops I saw you reading some terrorist literature, but you're innocent right? But if I didn't like you it would be easy. No proof necessary." Everyone repeat after me : witch-hunt.
Interestingly in a story about global communications satellites Arthur C. Clarke predicted that one of the prime uses of a communications system that could not be censored by governments would be the transmission of pornography (though he didn't actually call it that).
Don't remember the story title.
Ooops. Just checked, thanks for the correction. Don't know where I got 5 billion from.
There was a "major" oil discovery just last week in Alaska as I recall. About 4 billion barrels. Much joy all round. Except that the world uses up 5 billion barrels a YEAR and increasing.
Once you can't pump out the oil fast enough to meet demand then you have peak oil. There will still be a lot there (but diminishing) but you wont have enough and prices will sky rocket.
The oil price feeds into everything. From the price of food and materials to intangibles. Oil is needed to make a lot of things or to transport it or simply for electricity. A dramatic increase in the price of oil is a very serious thing. I remember when the first Gulf War was in full swing people were waving placards saying "no blood for oil", which I thought was stupid ... oil is worth paying for in blood. No oil, no civilisation. Mind you I think the current foray into Iraq was dumb beyond belief, but that's another matter.
Amen to that. When I saw it I was willing to watch anything that was even vaguely SF. No matter how bad. But I mentally gagged on BG. So pitiful it became my standard of bad SF ... oh except maybe for the tv series about Buck Rogers (shudder!). Didn't Larsen even say at one point that they had created a library of clips of space battles so they didn't have to do any more special effects? Well it showed.
So to see such an amazingly good recreation of it is a complete and very welcome surprise. I think the remake will join my small list of amazing SF on tv: A for Andromeda, Night of the Big Heat (not the terrible movie remake), Outer Limits (original), Star Trek, some of the X-Files.
... than a lamb. Wasn't that a saying back in times when you could be hung for minor crimes?
If they are going to kill you anyway then don't just release a virus to do a little bit of mischief, cause some deaths. In fact cause a LOT of deaths. Able to hack into a nuclear power plant? Go for it, see how far it'll blow. Enough people will think like that to make the suggestion very dangerous.
How can anyone rationally suggest this when law envorcement and the general public have no idea what "hacking" is anyway? I once told someone I worked (programmed) on crypto stuff ... and had to explain for the next 10 minutes that in fact it WAS legal. Gees! And these are the "peers" that would judge me?
Sorry, but I got about 2/3 of the way through this before I realised this is not a parody. Funny and disturbing.
Do you mean "Watts, Teslas and Farads?"
Actually for a long time I've suspected that the gross rate of innovation per capita has been dropping. But I don't think it is surprising. In smaller populations there is more incentive to innovate since there is usually no-one nearby with a solution to your problem. And bigger societies are generally dumber, well lazier is what I really mean. No-one has to innovate. Another factor may be that although a lot of people are innovating the mass media which fuels support (ie funds) for ideas can only handle a maximum load of new ideas, and that does not increase much with population.
As for the "end of innovation". Um ... since people have been inventing and innovating for almost all of the tenure of homo sapiens I don't think it is going to end. A nation or civilisation may suppress it, but they aren't going to last long anyway.
As Java becomes more and more popular you get developers who know jack shit taking it up. I talked to one the other day, nice guy, intelligent. He didn't know what design patterns were and he was a Java developer. Holly f**k! He didn't know about Netbeans and he didn't know about Eclipse. Unbelievable. I'm sure some of these people have never visited Javasoft or been to the Java Lobby sites. He was a *recent* graduate, and he had never touched any C. The mind boggles.
It isn't a "bold faced lie"(sic). At worst I was merely wrong. I based it on what was written in "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns". That book didn't say that they didn't realise something had happened they just didn't know what, only much later did they realise it was a nuclear weapon. Though some Japanese scientists feared a nuclear attack well before Hiroshima but were not listened to.
As for the burning city. Well when a single raid killed 100,000 in Tokyo from incendiaries do they automatically think this wasn't the result of a similar kind of attack?
If the attack includes multiple ground bursts on each missile silo (as expected). Then there is going to be a lot of short term radioactive fallout. If as a strategy of attack the enemy ground bursts a nuke on a nuclear power plant the amount of fallout will be immense causing probably more deaths than the blast would have. Scientific American did an analysis of this many years ago, creepy.
Just as a reminder. When people talk about modern nuclear war they think of one bomb hitting a city, which is of course very far from the truth. A large city may be targetted with half a dozen thermonuclear warheads with possible backup attacks coming later. The attacker may decide that some ground bursts in amongst those will prevent rebuilding any nearby infrastructure by adding lethal levels of radiation to the mix.
A lot of the scientists involved had thought that Japan would be shown the power of the nuke and then threatened. Failing that, that a military target would be used, Hiroshima wasn't that much of military target, otherwise why was it untouched in the regular bombings. However, even after Hiroshima was bombed communications within the country was so bad that the central government didn't know what had happened until the bombing of Nagasaki. Nagasaki was in that sense unnecessary and so too probably was Hiroshima. There was talk within the Japanese goverhment of surrender, an explicit threat of nuclear weapons was never made to tip the balance.
Too late now of course. Lots of bad shit happens in wars. What is not so well appreciated is that a lot of very very bad stuff happens in the closing days of a war, because the enemy defenses collapse and bloodlust takes over. Happens all through history, WW2 was no exception. You could view the use of nuclear weapons as an example of this with an unusually potent weapons technology. Still, more died in Tokyo or Dresden than at Hiroshima.
Yeah its fine to estimate the probabilities of various technologies based on existing theories. But remember that many many theories have bitten the dust. QM & Relativity seem particularly consistent but that is no guarantee that they are right or that some method of FTL wont be found.
Besides sometimes to make a point in a story you have to break a rule. Just so long as you don't do it too often (I think the writers call it The Tooth Fairy Principle). For instance, Foundation would be pretty crappy if they didn't have FTL wouldn't it? Whereas Benford's series about the war with the Machine Cultures (In the Ocean of night, Tides of light etc etc) does not use FTL at all and is still pretty good.
We are talking about fiction. If you make it too real it becomes boring. It was for this reason I could never stand anything Ben Bova wrote. SF is about vision not nuts and bolts.
When reading the headline, was I the only one who completed it as "Redhat Lays Groundwork for Fedora Foundation ... at the other end of the galaxy"? Oh. Guess not.
"one of the worst articles ever"?
Before you make such sweeping statements perhaps you should google for Enderley's other articles which easily outstrip even this article. The man is a master of crap, thank you very much. Not easily achieved!
Let me see, a feature in every other browser finally makes it to a non-released possible version of IE and it is news. Sorry, not trolling ... honestly, who gives a shit?
One of the clear conclusions of 20th century physics and psychology is that commonsense is very limited when dealing with the physical world. Just because something seems obvious that doesn't mean it is true.
A glaring example of this was a series of experiments done with freshman physics students to test their physical intuition. One of the questions involved something like the following: a bomber (plane) is coming over a target at such and such a speed show on the diagram where it should release the bombs. A huge percentage (the majority) don't remember the exact number, stated that the bombs should be released directly over the target. These are people who think they know about momentum but their intuition still works on the idea that the bomb will drop without any horizontal component. When I was a kid I tried using a sling (like the traditional type)j but couldn't work out why the stone came out at right angles to where I wanted it to go ... I had to think about it before I realised. But my instincts were wrong. So much for commonsense. And if you want the definitive example of this then look no further than Special Relativity or even better Quantum Mechanics.
Reminds me of the quote by Sir Ernest Rutherford: "We haven't got much money, so we'll have to think". Supposedly explaining the simple elegance of his experiments that got him the Nobel Prize.
One factor I find in going back to sources, of any kind, is that the work has a different quality to what comes after. Afterwards people extract the "good bits" and eventually it becomes the norm. But in the original the ideas live in an ecosystem, if you will, of other ideas that support it. I first noticed this when reading original scientific works, sure the later stuff says it better etc, but it doesn't include the revealing arguments and ideas of someone forging into the unkown (for example try reading Origin Of Species). They don't know how important their work is going to be, they have to therefore try to make their effort stand by itself. Old films are like this, you can see flaws (by later standards) but you can also see the technique or dialog in a new way.
Anyway, just my 2 cents.
... the women are HOT! A big redeeming feature.
Apart from that some of the songs are actually good. I was surprised last time I watched it ... I was totally mesmerised, like a combination of beatiful European women, some decent songs and a lot of subtle satire (without the performers realising it).
I'm hooked. It helps if the commentator is good at satire.
... is the phrase "is our destiny". When people start talking like this then really bad things start to happen. Surely I don't need to supply examples.
Repeatedly used 10^9 instead of 10^6. Obvious brain crash there folks.